4.0 Introduction
In this chapter, I translate my approach to design research – design research for resilience – into the actionable research design I conducted during 2011 to 2013. The research design resulted from interrelating synergistic aspects of resilience inquiry, practice theories, questions of type, and participatory design. The resultant opportunities for inquiry were signalled in Section 1.4, and include distributed, interdisciplinary knowledge forms; a concern for connecting spatial and temporal scales; participation by diverse stakeholders; and the generation of alternative, future scenarios that pursue ecological restoration and build adaptive capacity. In detailing how I devised and enacted the research design as design research for resilience, I venture here a partial response to the third research question, by articulating how design research can propose urban resilience strategies. The strategies, in turn, emerged from the enactment of the three-phase research design and are set out in Chapters 6, 7 and 8.
I first outline the three overlapping phases of the research design, conceived as research into, for and through design, in Section 4.1. I interrelate resilience concepts, practice theories, types, and participatory design in Section 4.2, establishing the theoretical basis of the research design. In Section 4.3, I detail Phase 1 of the study, comprising a social-ecological analysis of dominant food culture and domestic design. Phase 2, involving a multi-household ethnography in 12 food growing settings, is detailed in Section 4.4, with the Phase 3
I explain each of the three phases of the study in terms of its purpose in the service of a resilience agenda, rationale, theoretical framework, forms of data and analytical approach. Through these accounts I establish the linkages between the methods, aided by the willingness of a subset of Phase 2 household ethnography participants to proceed into Phase 3, leading to the integrative final design phase. Drawing on the theory of practice-based research, I outline the process of designing a means of articulating and
representing new design knowledge. This process was aided by the conceptual merger of the pattern language schema of Alexander, Ishikawa and Silverstein (1977), and the food axis of Collins Cromley (2010), as introduced in Chapters 1 and 2, and extended in Chapter 7. In applying these conceptual tools, my emphasis shifts to spatially mapping and representing both current and
speculative food axes, in pursuit of the targeted practices of food provisioning, storing, cooking and eating captured within them. Throughout the chapter, I interleave specific strategies adopted in pursuit of trustworthiness and
transferability, including Kvale’s (1995) communicative validity. I also address transferability extending beyond thesis submission, signalling a need to engage the design practitioner community for genuine transfer of new knowledge.
4.1 Research design overview
The study was conducted over three overlapping phases, indicated in Figure 4.1, directed by the research questions stated in Section 3.0, and shaped by the approach – design research for resilience – established in Chapter 3. Phase 1 – research into design – involved a social-ecological analysis of dominant visual and material culture centred on cooking, food culture, and the kitchen integral to domestic design. This led into Phase 2, involving ethnographic participation in 12 domestic food growing settings, reflecting research for design. Phases 1 and 2 extended into Phase 3 – research through design – comprising a series of participatory design workshops with individuals actively pursuing sustainable food producing activities at the scale of the home, some of whom also
participated in Phase 2. Phase 3 also involved my own design iterations in the latter stage of the study.
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Figure 4.1: The research design, shaped by my approach to design research for resilience defined in Chapter 3, also indicating the outcomes of the three inquiry phases
This phased approach addressed the need for induction into my chosen methods, and recognised that with the development of greater reflexivity, I would revisit phases over the course of the study. In Figure 4.1, the arrows indicate how Phase 1 informed Phases 2 and 3, and how Phase 2 fed back to refine the themes developed in the representation of Phase 1. Ongoing critical reflection loops, symbolised by the curved arrows, were re-directed toward the written representation of all three phases, guided by Kvale’s craft of inquiry involving “continually checking, questioning, and theoretically interpreting the [outcomes]” (1995, p. 27).
In Chapters 1 and 3, I foregrounded the foundational role of resilience concepts and highlighted their compatibility with practice theories, questions of type, and participatory design in this study, defining design research for resilience in the process. In Section 4.2, I interrelate these sets of concepts, and expand on how they have been applied to each of the study’s three phases.
4.2 Resilience inquiry, practice theories, types and
participatory design
In this section, I illuminate how my conduct of design research for resilience in this study applies the concepts for inquiry shown interrelated in Figure 4.2, and introduced in Section 1.4. I first interrelate resilience concepts with practices, Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) habitus, and housing types. I then highlight the
compatibility between resilience strategies and participatory design, noting their interplay in Phases 2 and 3 of the study. I also acknowledge the diversity of the study settings in supporting consideration of spatial and temporal scales, a key factor in resilience inquiry (Biggs et al., 2012; Moberg & Hauge Simonsen, 2011; Walker & Salt, 2006).
Figure 4.2: The interrelated foundational concepts for inquiry, highlighting the resilience strategies applied in the three-phase research design